The Deterritorialization of Sacred Medicines
Table of Contents
Across many Indigenous traditions, sacred plants have long been approached not as substances, but as beings: teachers, healers, and bridges to the more-than-human world. These plants and fungi, such as ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms, are often referred to as medicines, not simply because of their biochemical effects, but because of the relationships they cultivate—with self, spirit, land, and community.
In these traditions, plant medicine is never isolated from its ceremonial, ecological, and cultural context. It is part of a living system—a web of reciprocity where healing is not an individual event but a communal, spiritual, and ecological process. These medicines are embedded in stories, songs, rituals, and responsibilities. They are tied to place, to language, to cosmology.
However, in recent years, something has shifted.
Psychedelics are being rediscovered by the mainstream—framed in scientific journals as tools for healing trauma and treated by startups as assets for investment. This renewed interest, often called the "psychedelic renaissance," offers genuine potential for helping people. And yet, it also risks flattening the sacred into the profitable, the mysterious into the marketable.
When sacred plants are lifted from their traditional roots and recontextualized within global systems shaped by capitalism, colonialism, and technological acceleration, their meanings shift and often diminish. The challenge is to find ways to respect, rather than reduce, these medicines and to ask what it means to be in right relationship with plant and fungi beings in a time of planetary crisis.
Before we move forward with psychedelics, we must remember: these are not just drugs. They are living expressions of planetary intelligence and human cultures.
If we forget that, we may gain access to their power but lose their guidance.
From Ceremony to Commodity: The Deterritorialization of Plant Medicines
As psychedelics enter the global mainstream, many of the sacred substances at their foundation—ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, iboga—are being swept into new cultural and economic systems. Once held in specific ceremonial contexts by Indigenous communities, they are now appearing in biotech portfolios, clinical trials, wellness retreats, and tech startup pitches.
In this shift, something profound is happening: sacred plants and fungi are becoming products.
This process is known as deterritorialization. Originally coined by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it refers to the unmooring of cultural practices from their original landscapes, cosmologies, and relationships. Deterritorialization is what happens when a ceremonial plant like ayahuasca is bottled, branded, and sold far from the Amazon, stripped of the language, lineage, and the land that once held it in balanced and reciprocal relationship.
It is the shift from plant as kin to plant as commodity.
Globalization accelerates this process. As the flow of information, capital, and substances moves faster than ever before, the boundaries between sacred and secular, local and global, begin to dissolve. Sacred plants are reinterpreted through the lens of Western psychology, medicine, and market logic. They are studied in labs, discussed in podcasts, and delivered in clinical settings—often without meaningful engagement with the traditions from which they come.
This is not to say that all forms of modern use are harmful. There is no one “pure” or correct way to engage with plant medicines. But when their meanings are redefined solely through Western frameworks and detached from the relational ecosystems that once gave them context, they risk becoming hollow. For healing, we may unintentionally perpetuate extraction and erasure.
To engage with sacred substances today is to walk a delicate path. We are not only inheriting their therapeutic potential, we are also inheriting the ethical responsibility to ask: who holds the knowledge? who profits? and what is lost when plants and fungi once considered spiritual allies and sacred medicine are displaced from ceremony to commodity?
Sacred Plants & Fungi as Cultural Beings
To understand sacred substances solely through their chemical components is to miss the deeper story. In many Indigenous cultures, these plants and fungi are not just tools, they are beings. They are teachers, relatives, and elders. Their healing power is not just pharmacological, but relational. They are embedded in stories, held in rituals, and rooted in specific places.
In the Sierra Mazateca of Mexico, psilocybin mushrooms—hongos sagrados, or “sacred mushrooms”—have long played a central role in community life. Known also as niños santos or “sacred children,” these fungi are seen as spiritual beings that offer guidance and insight. Curanderos (ceremonial leaders and healers) use them not only for healing individuals, but for restoring harmony in families and communities. The mushrooms are not taken recreationally or in isolation; they are part of a worldview where plants/fungi, people, and spirits are interconnected.
Similarly, in the Amazon, ayahuasca is not just a psychedelic brew. It is a vine with a soul. The word “ayahuasca” itself comes from the Quechua language and carries layers of meaning tied to death, vision, and the spirit world. Within Amazonian cosmologies, ayahuasca ceremonies are a form of communication, an exchange between human and more-than-human intelligences. The brew is part of a wider web of songs, dietas, and rituals that guide the healing process.
This deep cultural embedding is not unique to psychoactive plants. In Brazil, the Wajãmpi people maintain a spiritual relationship with manioc, a staple food plant, while the A’uwẽ people revere maize and wild roots for their sacred significance. These examples remind us that the sacred is not defined by chemical intensity. Rather, it is defined by relationship, story, and reciprocity.
When sacred plants are detached from the cultures that hold them, their meaning shifts. The plant or fungi remains, but the spirit may be silenced. If we are to engage with these psychedelic-producing organisms ethically, we must learn to see them not as solely substances, but as cultural beings entangled in worlds of meaning that we cannot simply extract without consequence.
When Healing Becomes Harmful
It’s often said that psychedelics are amplifiers—they don’t show us what to think, but magnify what’s already present. In Indigenous settings, this amplification is carefully shaped by ritual, intention, nature and community. In modern contexts, however, what gets amplified can be more unpredictable, and at times, more dangerous.
Researchers have described psychedelics as politically pluripotent: they don’t inherently lead to any one worldview, but instead reflect and intensify the cultural, psychological, and political environment in which they’re used. This means that psychedelics can inspire compassion, solidarity, and ecological awareness. But they can just as easily reinforce privilege, nationalism, or settler colonial mindsets, especially when used without awareness of context and power.
The idea that psychedelics are inherently liberating is seductive, particularly in Western narratives that associate them with 1960s counterculture, civil rights, and antiwar protests. But history and emerging research suggest a more complicated picture. Psychedelics do not bypass political and social conditioning. They often reflect it.
This matters deeply when sacred medicines are used in settings shaped by structural violence or inequality. Without attention to power dynamics, psychedelic experiences can obscure more than they reveal. They can foster a sense of spiritual unity while glossing over the very real, ongoing harm some participants may be experiencing due to race, class, gender, or colonial history.
Healing is not neutral. When sacred plants are used in contexts that avoid or erase political realities, they can become tools of spiritual bypassing, sedatives rather than catalysts. They may create the illusion of peace while leaving oppressive systems intact.
This is the shadow side of deterritorialization: sacred plants, once rooted in rituals of community and justice, become tools in spaces where accountability is optional and history is ignored. If we are serious about healing, we must be serious about context. Psychedelics don’t just expand consciousness, they mirror it. What they reveal depends on what we’re willing to see.
Psychedelics & Palestine
To truly understand the ethical challenges of deterritorialized psychedelic use, we must look at real-world examples, especially those where power, identity, and violence converge.
One such context is Palestine.
Since 1948, Palestinians have faced systemic dispossession, occupation, and violence under the Israeli settler-colonial regime. Land has been seized, homes demolished, and basic rights denied. Amidst this brutal reality, some Israelis have turned to psychedelics—particularly ayahuasca—as tools for healing, spiritual awakening, or even peace-building. But without grounding these experiences in political awareness, the result can be troubling.
A 2021 study explored how shared ayahuasca ceremonies between Israelis and Palestinians created feelings of unity and oneness. Some participants described profound spiritual insights, moments of deep empathy, and the temporary dissolution of social identity. But beneath this appearance of connection, deeper patterns emerged. Palestinian participants reported feeling silenced, marginalized, and spiritually alienated. Ceremonies were conducted primarily in Hebrew, using Israeli spiritual jargon and frameworks. Political realities such as occupation, displacement, and apartheid—were discouraged as topics of discussion.
What emerged was a form of psychedelic spirituality that appeared inclusive, but in practice reproduced colonial dynamics. Unity was encouraged, but only if it meant setting aside Palestinian identity. Peace was welcomed, but only if it didn't disrupt the comfort of those in power.
Sacred medicine was present, but the context was tilted.
More recently, this dynamic has taken on disturbing new forms. Videos have surfaced of Israeli outdoor raves held during military sieges on Gaza—participants dancing in forests under the influence of psychedelics while protesting the delivery of humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
Here, the spiritual veneer of psychedelic experience masks something darker: a refusal to confront complicity in violence.
This is what deterritorialization can look like when sacred plants are unmoored from accountability. The same molecules that once mediated healing in traditional cultures are now being used in ways that reinforce domination, erase suffering, and aestheticize occupation.
None of this is to say that sacred plants cannot be tools for reconciliation. But healing requires more than good intentions, it demands justice. For psychedelic use to be truly transformative, it must be grounded in truth-telling, power analysis, and solidarity with the oppressed.
Anything less risks turning medicine into a mirror for denial.
The Pharmakon: Medicine or Poison?
The ancient Greeks had a word that captures the paradox of healing: pharmakon. It means both medicine and poison. Remedy and risk, cure and harm—contained within the same substance. Psychedelics, and the sacred plants from which many derive, are quintessential pharmaka.
Today, these substances are often framed as miracle cures. Media headlines, clinical studies, and biotech startups all echo the same message: psychedelics will save us from depression, addiction, anxiety, even from ourselves. But such optimism can be misleading when it forgets the conditions in which these substances are taken, and the worldviews they reflect.
Psychedelics are not inherently healing. They are not neutral either. They reflect and intensify the cultural, emotional, and political environment they are used within. In some settings, they catalyze profound personal and communal transformation. In others, they can deepen narcissism, spiritual bypassing, or even amplify systems of domination and exclusion.
This dual nature is especially important to consider as psychedelics are increasingly folded into systems shaped by neoliberalism, where health is individualized, trauma is decontextualized, and healing is marketed as a product. Without careful attention, these sacred medicines may become just another tool for optimization in a culture obsessed with performance and self-improvement.
Pharmakon reminds us that every medicine carries risk.
The question is not just whether psychedelics work, but how, for whom, and toward what ends. Do they bring us into deeper relationship with life, with land, with each other? Or do they become another distraction, another consumer product dressed up as spiritual insight?
Sacred substances are not magic bullets. They are complex, context-dependent agents. If we forget that, we risk turning potential medicine into modern poison, not because of the plants and fungi themselves, but because of the systems into which they are being absorbed.
Toward Right Relationship
If sacred substances are to be part of a healing future, then healing must extend beyond the individual. It must include ecosystems, communities, and the histories carried in the land. This requires moving from extraction to relationship, from consumption to communion.
Across Indigenous traditions, sacred plants and fungi are engaged through relational ontologies—worldviews that recognize these ancient beings as kin, teachers, and agents with their own dignity and agency. These relationships are shaped by reciprocity, ceremony, and responsibility, not ownership or control. Healing emerges not from isolated encounters with a substance, but from being woven back into a web of human and more-than-human connection.
To honor these medicines today, we must listen to and learn from the communities who have safeguarded and understood them for generations. This means centering Indigenous leadership, respecting the cultural protocols that accompany plant use, and addressing the material and political realities that many Indigenous communities face—from land theft to cultural appropriation to epistemological erasure.
It also means challenging the capitalist logics that frame sacred plants as commodities to be bought, sold, and optimized. Authors like Williams and Brant call for a “kin-centric cosmology” in the psychedelic space—one that recognizes not only the personhood of plants and fungi, but the need to decolonize our relationships to healing, land, and knowledge.
We must ask ourselves: What would psychedelic healing look like if guided by principles of reciprocity, resistance, and reverence? What would it mean to participate in a gift economy of care, rather than a marketplace of extraction?
These are not abstract questions.
They invite practical changes—collaborative research models, reparative funding structures, cultural humility trainings, and a collective willingness to unlearn colonial habits.
Sacred plants and fungi are generous. But generosity should not be mistaken for permission to take without giving back. If we are to walk this path with integrity, we must root ourselves in relationships that honor where these medicines come from and where they want to lead us.
Grounding the Renaissance in Responsibility
The return of psychedelics to mainstream attention is a moment of possibility.
These substances, many of which come from sacred plants and fungi with deep Indigenous lineages, hold potential to support healing in a time of widespread crisis. Mental health struggles, ecological collapse, and spiritual disconnection all cry out for deeper, wiser forms of reconnection.
Psychedelics may be part of that response. But possibility is not promise.
The so-called psychedelic renaissance is unfolding within systems that have long prioritized profit over people, and consumption over care. Without deliberate reflection, this renaissance risks reproducing the very patterns of disconnection that these medicines are meant to heal.
Globalization has deterritorialized sacred substances, lifting them from their lands, languages, and lineages. In doing so, it has opened doors for their therapeutic use but also for their commodification, misuse, and erasure. The example of psychedelic use in Palestine, where spirituality was used to obscure ongoing colonial violence, is not an anomaly, it is a warning.
We must remember: psychedelics are not inherently liberatory. They are amplifiers. What they amplify depends on the intentions, structures, and values of those who use them.
The path forward requires more than open minds. It requires open hearts, open ears, and a willingness to confront difficult truths. It asks us to listen to Indigenous voices, to question dominant narratives, and to build systems rooted in reciprocity, reverence, and justice.
Sacred plants and fungi have much to teach us, but only if we approach them with humility. Let this renaissance be more than a rebranding. Let it be a remembering: of the sacred, of the land, of our responsibilities to each other and to the more-than-human world.
Enjoyed this essay? Read The Empire of Mind next to dive deeper.
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